How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#1

Post by 100011_100001 » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

Some days are quiet and I can concentrate on writing code, but those are a rare occasion. It has become increasingly common to have multiple meetings through out the day. To make matter worse, the better code I write, the more meetings I get invited in.

As I get more comfortable with my abilities the constant stream of interruptions is bugging me. How do I deal with this? I've talked to my boss that I am into too many meetings and he has said I can go offline and skip meetings, yet he expects me to be in meetings because he requires my expertise for complicated technical subjects that come up.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#2

Post by genmud » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

There are 2 things that I do to help mitigate this:

1) Block off a day (or two) for no meetings

2) If there is no agenda, no clear reason for meeting, I decline or email them asking for clarity for the meeting reason. If it is something that can be answered via email or slack, I typically try to encourage a response via those methods.

The biggest issue with meetings is the context switch, so if you can consolidate as many of them as possible, rather than having them peppered through your day, I find that to be the best way of dealing with them.

edit:

I forgot to add that I try to encourage people to schedule meetings during my non productive times. For me, the mornings are typically my least productive time, because I am tired, groggy and just starting to get oriented for the day. If I schedule them during that time, it allows me to use my afternoons which are my productive time for actual work.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#3

Post by mikece » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

Something the VP of Engineering did at my current employer was to put a daily "Focused Work Time" calendar blocker on all devs' calendar from 8:00 AM until 10:30 AM. The understanding this has communicated to other departments is that developer time is precious and interrupting them for menial crap isn't just a "hey, can I get five minutes of your time" but something that is significantly more disruptive and time costing. The bulk of meetings (status reports, incident reviews, training, info sharing) happens early in the afternoon, usually right after lunch when one's motivation to get into serious mental activity is less than from 3pm to 5pm.

This has been awesome but would haven been impossible if not driven by a VP with the backing of the CEO. Things like this -- or "adopting agile" -- have to have backing from above and buy-in across departments to have any chance of success.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#4

Post by syxaxis » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:03 PM UTC

I often get same thing. If I think the meeting might benefit me or it critical to get my way then I go along. If I think it might be simply making up numbers, I check in with the PM and see why the meeting has been called, if I'm not needed I tell my manager and then I block in the time in my calendar. I tell the PM to call me only if they think I'm needed for s short comment one something important.

I often block in an entire afternoon with 1hr bookings to stop people seeing free time show up in my calendar when they're looking to call a meeting, then I put on the do not disturb in MS Teams and get some work done.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#5

Post by 100011_100001 » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:18 PM UTC

mikece wrote: post #3

Something the VP of Engineering did at my current employer was to put a daily "Focused Work Time" calendar blocker on all devs' calendar from 8:00 AM until 10:30 AM. The understanding this has communicated to other departments is that developer time is precious and interrupting them for menial crap isn't just a "hey, can I get five minutes of your time" but something that is significantly more disruptive and time cos…

That's part of the problem. It has to come from the top, and for management working is meeting. It's how they get information and delegate. It's why in most companies that kind of approach is not brought up.

If I could have a half day work, half day meeting breakdown it would increase my productivity for sure. What grinds me down is if I get done with a meeting, and I have another meeting in 25 minutes it's simply not enough time to waste energy to get to the right headspace just so that I can stop right after I get there.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#6

Post by glsdfgkjsklfj » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:19 PM UTC

like everyone else. skip the tests and docs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#7

Post by 100011_100001 » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:26 PM UTC

genmud wrote: post #2

There are 2 things that I do to help mitigate this: 1) Block off a day (or two) for no meetings 2) If there is no agenda, no clear reason for meeting, I decline or email them asking for clarity for the meeting reason. If it is something that can be answered via email or slack, I typically try to encourage a response via those methods. The biggest issue with meetings is the context switch, so if you can consolidate as…

> 1) Block off a day (or two) for no meetings

Having analyzed my own productivity patterns it seems that I can at max work on code for 2 hours straight without a break. After that I need time to reset, stop thinking about code so I can re-evaluate my design choices, variable names etc. That time appears to be about 1 hour.

So in theory if I had a day or two of no meetings, I wouldn't be coding the whole day. Ideally I would be the most productive having 2 hours of uninterrupted time in the morning, and another 2 in the afternoon, but that's really hard to delineate.

> 2) If there is no agenda, no clear reason for meeting, I decline or email them asking for clarity for the meeting reason. If it is something that can be answered via email or slack, I typically try to encourage a response via those methods.

The thing that gets me is that most meetings are tangentially useful to me. No one posts meeting minutes though, so unless I am there I don't know what the end decision is which might or might not affect me. I have debated doing this, asking for an agenda, but I seem to hesitate.

> I forgot to add that I try to encourage people to schedule meetings during my non productive times.

I do this as well, but there are so many instances where I am all primed to write code and a meeting is about to start in 15-20 minutes.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#8

Post by yokaze » Tue, Mar 30, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

I follow the advice of Greg Crenshaw: Schedule everything in your calendar. That includes coding. Time before and after meetings for preparation and review. Reading and answering emails... You get the drift.

Be generous with the estimates.

And personally I liked to push the responsibility back to the organiser of the meeting, if there is a conflict with the schedule, i.e. affects my deliverables: sure, I can attend that meeting but that means X gets delayed. Is that okay?

Like many engineer-minded people, I consider (possibly wrongly) meetings as a waste of time. This way, I don't have to weigh meeting time against coding time myself. And everyone is aware of the trade-offs needed to be done.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#9

Post by markus_zhang » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

See if u can book yourself blocks of time everyday so that people cannot assign meetings to you. I did that occasionally and everytime someone throws me a meeting I just decline it if it conflicts with that block of time.

Re: How do you balance writing code with constant meetings?

#10

Post by clusmore » Wed, Mar 31, 2021, 6:37 AM UTC

The other answers here are mostly suggesting reactive steps to the situation that you are being flooded with meeting invites and need to respond to them (block time in your calendar, decline meetings). These are good strategies that work in a broad range of environments, because attending meetings is a personal decision for you as an individual.

I'd like to at least suggest the proactive approach - to try to cut down on meetings. The meetings you describe sound like they are doing the work of either a planning session or a backlog refinement session, but are done on an ad-hoc basis throughout the week. If the people scheduling these meetings are inside your sphere of influence (your team, or close neighbouring teams), can you try to encourage a culture where this sort of work is confined to a start-of-week planning session and a mid-week refinement session? Even if these are 2-3 hours each, at least the scheduling is predictable, and more importantly, timeboxed. If they're done on an ad-hoc basis, you can easily lose track of how much time is spent in these meetings, and you can end up "planning/designing" work much further into the future than is really necessary. Also, no meeting ever takes less than 30 minutes and all meeting expand to fill the time allocated to them, so you might find that six 30 minute sessions spread throughout the week could be completed in one 2hr meeting in a single solid block.

This obviously only works if you have some kind of influence over the people scheduling these meetings, which is why I say that the reactive approach of blocking time/declining meetings is more broadly applicable, but it's worth a shot regardless.